From the archives of the Drawn! blog:
“Megan Jeffery is celebrating 17 years of freelance illustration by sharing 17 of the most valuable lessons she’s learned.”
Excellent advice for anyone who freelances or is considering a freelance career. I’ve been doing it myself for over ten years now, and I’ve made a few mistakes along the way. I wish I had read a list like this when I was first starting out.
I’m currently busy with several projects which I can’t really talk about (yet). Since I can’t post any new art, here’s some studies I did a while back from the book In Character: Actors Acting
The book is an excellent resource for studying facial expressions. Most photo reference books have amateur models giving stock expressions (sad, happy, scared, etc.). In this book, professional actors were given unique dramatic situations and then asked to act them out (i.e. “You are a pediatrician with a bright five-year-old cancer patient who is making up an intriguing fairy tale.”) The results are rich and expressive. A great resource for any artist seeking to learn more about expressiveness and emotion.
It’s moving day. I’m in the process of transferring my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds. The link to my new feed is the blue button on the right.
I’m quite fond of Blogger, but the more I’ve learned about WordPress the more I’ve found its just a better site with more options and features. So, welcome to my new home!
Be patient with me while I unpack the boxes and get everything set up. I was able to import all my past content from Blogger except the pictures amd links. I have to do that myself one at a time. And since this is primarily an art blog, that’s a lot of pictures for me to import. But I’m excited to be here.
I’m also hoping to post more often. With WordPress I can write several posts at once and then schedule them to show up one per day. That way, when I’m in a writing mood I can do more than just one entry….giving the illusion that I am more organized that I really am, and hopefully resulting in more frequent posts.
iPhone mania is coming Friday. People are posting on Craig’s List hoping to hire someone to stand in line for them (lines have already started at one New York store.) I smell a career opportunity here. Find a wealthy businessman and offer to stand in line for him at the post office, the grocery store, the DMV…yessir, big money!
Last week I finally bought the new Adobe CS3 suite. Kinda buggy, but overall I really like the new look and feel of the applications. The new menus and palettes are a bit disorienting at first but I’ll adjust soon. So far my only complaints are that merging layers in Photoshop feels clumsy, Bridge keeps crashing, and Paris Hilton is still in the news.
Today I went to the book store and bought some new software reference books for CS3. I also bought Designing a Digital Portfolio
My sleep schedule has been off lately, thanks to insomnia and converging deadlines. When I was single I would often stay up all night working on freelance projects. One of the perks of working at home and living alone was that I could work, eat, and sleep whenever I felt like it. For several years I went through a strange cycle where I couldn’t sleep until I had been awake for at least 20 hours, causing my waking hours to gradually shift around the clock from nights to days over about a 3 or 4 week period. Now that I’ve got a wife and baby that’s not working out so well. I’m trying to get my body to adjust to a normal schedule, but every couple of weeks I still get attacked by insomnia. I wonder if being a night owl is something innate, like being left-handed, or if its something that can be unlearned?
Have you seen the new Geico commercials? (“There are better ways to spend 15 minutes on the internet”). The caveman thing was funny but is getting stale. It’s great to see them trying something new. You’ve got to hand it to the Geico ad folks, their campaigns have consistently stood out amidst the cluttered advertising landscape. Not an easy feat.
Finally, my wife and I have joined Blockbuster Total Access. Not that we watch that many movies, but we have a Blockbuster just down the street so it will be nice to exchange movies immediately instead of waiting for tomorrow’s mail. The no late fees thing will also be nice since movies sometimes sit on our shelf for quite a while before we finally get around to watching them. We rented “Pursuit of Happyness” twice and still haven’t seen it. We’re trying the cheapest Blockbuster plan (2 movies a month for 6 bucks) so we’ll see how it goes. We’re going to start with the classics we’ve never seen. Cassablanca is first, then it’s Bonnie and Clyde, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and eventually Little House on the Prairie season 3.
As a freelancer, working at home has a lot of benefits. But one drawback is that I spend most days holed up in my little cave and isolated from the outside world. (Weather…what’s that?) The busier I am, the worse it gets. So when my time and budget permit, I go to as many conferences and art-related events as I possibly can. Its my only opportunity to network and hang out with other creative types.
The more I grow as a professional, the more important I find such networking becomes. Talent will only get you so far. Passion and personality are just as important, maybe even moreso.
Plus, since many of my friends and relatives struggle to understand exactly what I do for a living, its refreshing to chat with other creatives who “get it”. It’s great to make those personal connections with other people in the biz. And at every event I always pick up great tidbits and tricks that I can take home and use in my business. And if I’m lucky, I occassionally make a connection that leads to paying work down the road. The travel and registration costs aren’t cheap, but the connections I make and the knowledge I gain almost always make the trips worthwhile.
I’m still pretty rusty at networking. Like many freelancers, I’m more comfortable by myself than I am around other people. I’m not great at small talk. But with every event I attend, I learn more and grow a little more confident. And I always walk away better for the experience.
In the last month I’ve attended two events, the Reubens and Flashbelt.
In May I traveled to Orlando for the Reuben Awards, a yearly event held by the National Cartoonists Society. Thanks to the kind sponsorship of illustrator Tom Richmond (pictured, left) I have the honor of being a member of the NCS. I’ve attended chapter events in the past but this was my first time at the Reuben’s. For two days I walked among some of the world’s greatest living cartoonists, which was a little intimidating but also exciting.
I had a nice chat with Stephen Silver, from whom I’ll be taking an online character design class this fall (check it out at schoolism.com). I also shook hands with C.F. Payne, Sam Viviano, Dave Coverly, Chris Browne, and many other talented folks from all over the country. Everyone was very friendly and it was an honor just to be there. As you migh imagine, cartoonists are a fun bunch to hang around.
By the way, congratulations to Tom Richmond on winning another Reuben Award for Magazine Illustration. This is his third, I think.
Earlier this week I attended Flashbelt here in Minneapolis. Flashbelt is a large conference for programmers, designers, and animators (like me) who use Adobe’s Flash software. The seminars ran the gamut, but there were some good ones on promoting yourself as an artist and on being successful as a freelancer. Even though I’ve got ten years of freelancing under my belt, I still learned a few things about improving my self-promotion efforts and strengthening client relationships.
There were also some fun afterparties where I had the chance to chat with lots of fun artists and animators, many who live right here in the Twin Cities. It was fun to hang out, share tips/advice, and hear about what’s going on at some of the local agencies.
Next up is Comic-Con in July. I attended again last year and had a blast. Unfortunately I probably won’t be able to go this year. But I’ve heard great things about the HOW design conference later this year. If any of you readers have ever attended, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought.
Now get out there and network!
Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ve heard about the upcoming release of Apple’s new wonder-gadget, the iPhone. I’m a bit of a Machead, and I’ve been excited about the iPhone ever since Steve Jobs introduced the dazzling new product back in January. It’s a truly amazing device…but also an expensive one. The “cheap” model is $500, and the more expensive model with twice as much memory is $600.
To use the phone you have to switch to Cingular/AT&T with a 2-year commitment. Fortunately I’m already a Cingular customer. However, the rumors are that Cingular will charge an additional fee of $30 or $40 per month to use the iPhone’s internet capabilities. Add taxes and fees and you’re looking at a minimum of $400 per year, times two years equals $800. Add in the $600 cost for the phone, and suddenly the iPhone has a total cost of $1,400.
But the iPhone is such an amazing device that for me it just might be worth it. Maybe. To learn about all of its incredible features, visit the official iPhone website or watch Steve Jobs give a snazzy demonstration. A quick Google search will also reveal that there are plenty of websites praising (and criticizing) the iPhone. Either way, its sure to revolutionize the cell phone industry.
Here’s a list of some of the Pros and Cons that I am personally weighing as I consider whether or not to buy one:
PROS
(My current cell phone has some nice features, i.e. syncs with my computer’s address book and calendar, so for me this is a fairly short list).
1. Virtual voice-mail is a smart feature. But I would rarely use it since I don’t get that many voice mails at once.
2. Being able to browse the full internet and check my e-mails anywhere, anytime would be great. I would use that feature a lot. I mean a lot. Take shopping for example. If I’m in a bookstore and considering the purchase of a book or DVD, I could jump onto Amazon.com and see if someone is selling a used copy cheaper than what the bookstore is asking. If you can access the internet anywhere, anytime, that opens up a lot of possibilities.
3. I could listen to podcasts and other iTunes content even if I don’t have my iPod along. However, it is unclear to me whether I could listen through the speakerphone or if I would have to carry headphones with me.
4. It would be great to easily enter new events into iCal.
5. The Google Maps application looks like a great feature. You can even save certain locations as favorites. For example, my sister moved earlier this year and I always had trouble figuring out how to get to her new place. It would have been nice to have it saved as a favorite so I didn’t have to look it up every time.
CONS
1. Price. This phone ain’t cheap. Can I really afford it? Are the convenient features really worth the cost?
2. A slow connection. The phone theoretically will let you surf the web and send an e-mail and talk on the phone all at the same time. If you are in a free wi-fi environment that should be no problem (although free wi-fi environments are rare). But if you are out and about, the only option is AT&T’s Edge network, which I hear is disappointingly slow compared to their competitors. Maybe even as slow or slower than regular dial-up. (EDIT: According to this article, it takes half a minute for a web page to load on the Edge network.) Clients frequently send me e-mails with attachments, and I’m not sure I want to wait five minutes or more to download my latest e-mails. And if Apple ever does get around to supporting faster networks, could that be fixed with a software update or would I have to buy another iPhone?
3. A related problem with e-mail: How does that work with two devices (my computer and my iPhone) both checking the same e-mail? When my computer downloads e-mail, I can tell it to either delete the e-mail from the server or leave it there. If I have it set to delete, and then use my iPhone to check my e-mail, the message will then disappear from the server and my studio computer will never be able to retrieve it. On the other hand, if I have it set to NOT delete, then both devices will download the same messages each time they check for e-mail. Either option sounds inefficient to me. Or is there a way to work around this? (If you know of one, please leave me a comment.) (EDIT: Apparantly this problem is solved with something called “push e-mail”.)
4. The phone may not have voice dialing, a feature I use a lot on my current phone (especially while driving). Apple has not said whether it does or doesn’t. Since Apple has repeatedly drawn attention to all the other features, I worry that no news is bad news.
5. The iPhone’s memory is pretty small. The only options are 4GB and 8GB. Add in all the software and you won’t have much room for storing video (i.e. TV shows or movies). I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a year from now Apple releases new models that are 10GB or 20GB in size (that’s the strategy they’ve used to get people to keep buying bigger and better iPods). Maybe I should wait until a bigger model comes out before plopping down my hard earned-cash?
6. The truth is I don’t really NEED an iPhone. It’s pretty much just a luxury item that would make certain aspects of my life a little easier. And as a Christian I’m not supposed to covet. So I really should only buy it if I truly believe it would be a worthwhile purchase from a practical standpoint. Which it might be. Maybe.
Either way, I know I won’t be buying an iPhone when they are released on June 29 since my local Apple store will be a madhouse. I’d rather wait a couple of weeks and read what iPhone users have to say online. Maybe the product will have some as-of-yet unknown flaws. Or maybe it will be more amazing than expected. Who knows? Besides, Apple will probably sell out on June 29, forcing me to wait a couple of months before more arrive in stores.
Is anyone else planning to buy one? Let me know what you think.
